The field of computer vision, which seeks to replicate the capabilities of human vision through data analysis from moving and still images, has seen a number of crazy technological advances in recent years. Machines can now hunt prey, generate accurate sounds for silent videos, and analyze the world's imperceptible movements. A few years ago, researchers even taught a computer how to estimate a person's heart rate just by analyzing their face—a technology that was so advanced by 2012 that it could be used on a smartphone.This is possible through the analysis of selected skin pixels in an image of a face. The computer would then analyze tonal differences in the color of the skin and use this analysis to estimate the person's heart rate. It's kind of like wearing your heart on your sleeve, but instead it's on your face.This was impressive, but the computer still needed a lot of assistance in determining which areas of the face to analyze in order to determine the heart rate. Now, a team of international researchers has wildly improved on this facial analysis approach by designing a system which is not only capable of estimating a person's heart rate based on their face, but will also simultaneously determine which areas of the face are best for producing accurate estimates.Moreover, this new approach is able to make this happen in natural settings and in real time—unlike its forerunners, there's no need to prep the computer for the analysis.The above video is based on a presentation the researcher's gave earlier this month in Las Vegas during CVPR, the world's largest computer vision conference. As explained in the video and its accompanying research paper, the team ran its algorithm on the MAHNOB-HCI and MMSE-HR databases, which are comprised of vast numbers of video examples used to teach machines how to recognize and tag various human emotions. According to the team, their method is far more accurate than earlier heart rate estimation approaches and can maintain this accuracy while estimating a person's heart rate in real time.If the idea of a machine knowing your heart rate just by looking at you makes you nervous, don't worry about trying to keep your cool—the computer already knows how you feel.
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